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Forget Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison - there’s a new breed of rock star in town. They might be not able to play the guitar, but they still know how to work a crowd. They are “social rockstars” - the power users on social news sites.

There has been a lot of talk about “social rock stars” and their importance to the process of submitting content to social news sites. SEOMoz found that the top 100 Digg users control 56% of the homepage. More recent statistics show that the top 100 Digg users are responsible for 48% of the content that appears on the home page. This isn’t just the case with Digg; if you looked at all social news sites the results would be fairly similar.

While there has been lots of analysis on the power of these “social rock stars”, little attempt has been made to identify exactly why power users are now so important or even why they are needed. The argument is that if a site were truly democratic then content would rise to the top, no matter who submitted it. However, few people have looked at the cultural reasons behind the emergence of these power users.

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If you’ve spent any amount of time on Digg you’ll know how popular the “top (number)” lists are. Top 5, 10, 50 and 100 lists regularly reach the front page - but which number list is the most popular of all?

We analysed 766 list stories on Digg to find the most popular “top list”. To do this we searched for any story that reached the front page containing the word, “top” in the title.

Obviously, there were some stories that contain “top” in the title without a number, such as “Top Secret Pictures from Iran” and “Top Gear - Tiny Car Review” but only submissions that were in a numbered list format are included in the analysis regardless of whether the number was written as a word (ten) or as a number (10). Buried stories were not included.

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Do you welcome Global Warming with open arms because electricity bills will be down and the weather will be hot all year around?? If you don’t, and you run a political or environmental blog, then Care2.com might just be able to deliver a small boost in traffic to your site.

Care2.com is a social news network for social activism topics, such as, the environment, green lifestyles, politics and health. If your blog has anything to do with these subjects then you should consider submitting your articles, here’s why:

Reach a targeted audience - you will be submitting content to an audience that genuinely cares about your message.

Easier to reach the front page than larger sites - while some of the larger social news and bookmark sites feature social activism stories, it’s far easier to reach the front page on Care2.com than those sites. You can also use it as an indicator to see what might become popular on the larger sites, such as, Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

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Picture by: destinetics

Here’s a collection of 115 social bookmark and news sites ranked by PageRank, number of links and value of each site.

We used dnScoop to gather the data for all these sites. This is what the dnScoop data is based on:

Page Rank- Google PageRank

Inbound Links- The total number of pages that contain links to www.sitename.com

Site Value Report - This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.

The list was based on this social bookmarking list . We added a few more sites, such as, Shoutwire.com, Plime.com and PixelGroovy.com.

The dollar value of the sites are a bit misleading (is Simpy.com really worth $302,332,960 more than Digg?), but this list should hopefully provide you with some data on social news and bookmark that you haven’t seen before. If anybody knows of any better online tools to roughly estimate the value a site then leave a link in the comments section and we’ll update this list over the next few weeks and compare the data.

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